LET'S
DECLARE VICTORY  and get out!

The
military campaign against the Taliban has fulfilled
the expectations of Pakistan's ruler, General Musharraf,
who hoped it would be "short and sharp." And
so it was. All of a sudden, the scent of victory
is in the air. Last week, according to our disgruntled
hawks, the war was "stalled," and Senator
John McCain and his amen chorus in the media were
griping that it was time to put in the ground troops
 American ground troops, that is. Oh, what a difference
a week makes! Now, it appears, the Taliban is broken,
the "Northern Alliance" has marched victoriously
into Kabul, and, as
one news report put it:

"Afghans
brought their radios out of hiding and played music
in the streets, savoring the end of five years of
harsh Taliban rule as the northern alliance marched
triumphantly into Afghanistan's capital Tuesday."

LET'S
GET NAKED!

THE
END

This
war, which was supposed to take years, is now essentially
over. "They're not retreating, they're not withdrawing,
they're in a total rout, they're panicked,'' declared Bill
Taylor, senior adviser of international security affairs at
the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "As
a governing entity, the Taliban is finished"  and, therefore,
so is Operation Enduring Freedom .

A
PRICE ON HIS HEAD

Of
course, there's still the question of Osama bin Laden and
the hardcore Taliban: but it's only a matter of time (a few
weeks, at most) before they're mopped up, and the Evil One
is either killed, or captured. Already, the Northern Alliance
is setting up checkpoints throughout the Afghan countryside,
and the intelligence agencies of all key players are homing
in on the man at the top of America's Most Wanted list. The
US is offering $25 million to the lucky Afghan who brings
us the head of Bin Laden, just about enough to build "President"
Rabbani, the religious scholar who heads up the Northern Alliance,
a nice new presidential palace.

Or
perhaps the new government  which has already begun to assert
its authority in Kabul  will put the money to better use
by paying a Washington public relations firm to prettify Northern
Alliance atrocities. Haron Amin, the shifty-eyed little greaseball
serving as their spokesman, has been all over television in
the past 24 hours. Amin is supremely unconvincing: his perpetually
smiling face twitches as he rationalizes widespread killing
of POWs and others by calling the Taliban "Nazis"
In
an interview with Gwen Ifill, on the PBS News Hour,
Amin was asked to respond to the atrocities allegations and
also say how he intended to stop Northern Alliance troops
from going into Kabul. Addressing the atrocity question first,
Amin averred:

"If
there's anyone in the world that can say that the Taliban
have not committed atrocities that would be mistaken. The
Taliban have done the kind of atrocities that humanity hasn't
seen for the last couple hundred of years."

GWEN
IFILL: "So an eye for an eye is okay?"

AMIN:
"No. Certainly not. The fact of the matter is certain
acts of reprisal in local bases should not implicate the united
front. That's number one. Secondly the resolve of the united
front is not to go into Kabul and unless a political road
map is in place."

FREE
TO BE VAPID

Even
as Amin's lies were being broadcast, troops under the command
of the various warlords who make up the Northern Alliance
were marching into Kabul. Oh, but never mind that: after all,
why complain when the Northerners are "liberating"
their Afghan brethren? What's a few hundred (or thousands?)
of "revenge killings" (the exculpatory phrase the
Western media used to describe the reverse ethnic cleansing
of Kosovo after the KLA victory)? Who cares about such minor
details when, finally, the long-suffering people of Afghanistan
are now "free" to hear Britney Spears' latest love
song?

FREE
TO GROOM

Never
mind those bothersome atrocities  as Tucker Carlson put it
on
Crossfire, "Is now really the time to be criticizing
the Northern Alliance if they freed millions of people in
Afghanistan?"  when the really important issue
is the freedom to groom. Hailing the great advances
being brought to "liberated" Afghanistan by Northern
Alliance troops, Amin told Ifill:

"Certainly
in other parts of Afghanistan what we have seen right now
is in Mazar women for the first time have been able to go
out of their houses. People in Herat women have been able
to venture outside their houses and at their own desire without
any sort of problem on the street whatsoever. Men, some of
them have ventured into barbershops to get the kind of haircut
that they want, so on and so forth."

TROUBLE
ON THE HORIZON

Those
women venturing out into the street are taking their lives
in their hands, because the last time the forces associated
with the Northern Alliance took Kabul, there
was mayhem in the streets. As for the men: if the past
is any indication, these freshly coifed freedom-fighters will
soon replace the Taliban and Al Qaeda as our principal enemies
in the region. "President" Rabbani has already rejected
the "imposition" of the exiled King Zahir as titular
head of a provisional government of national unity, and the
Alliance high command has declared they
don't need any UN or American "peacekeepers," thank
you, they can handle it all by themselves. Why argue with
them? Just as soon as we lay our hands on Bin Laden &
Co., and the last remnants of Al Qaeda are mopped up, it's
time to declare victory, fold up our tent, and come on home.

THE
DANGER ZONE

The
real danger, as it turns out, is not to be found in a protracted
conflict with our enemies  Al Qaeda and the Taliban  but
in managing and reining in our alleged "allies"
in this war. We will be bogged down, not in fighting, but
in "nation-building." The big problem is that the
materials at hand are not very promising.

BACK
TO DISUNION

The
bewildering array of factions and sub-factions that make up
the so-called Northern Alliance is a subject made impenetrable
by the sheer proliferation
of parties, militias, and rival warlords, all of them
caught up in a kaleidoscopic history of shifting alliances
and stunning betrayals. Suffice to say that what Afghanistan
is in for is an instant replay of what happened the last time
this same crew took power: the various ethnic and religious
factions immediately fell to fighting among themselves. The
result was the rule of the warlords, who divided the country
up into various fiefdoms, and instituted a reign of terror,
paving the way for the rise of the Taliban. Now the pendulum
is swinging from totalitarianism back to anarchy. We are witnessing
the dissolution of the central government of Afghanistan (always
a precarious fiction) and a total reversion to its natural
state of combative disunion.

AGAINST
NEO-COLONIALISM

There
is no way to prevent this process, or even to manage it, short
of sending in American troops and converting Afghanistan into
a gigantic Bosnia. As one
advocate of a frankly colonialist policy declared, what
Afghanistan needs is "not just food parcels, but British courts
and Canadian police and Indian civil servants and American
town clerks and Australian newspapers." In this view, we cannot
rest until Kabul is transformed into a reasonable facsimile
of Everytown, USA (or Canada, or Britain)  a feat of social
engineering not even attempted by the Soviets, who were initially
reluctant to intervene on behalf of their fanatically "modernizing"
Communist allies.

AMERICA
GOES SOVIET

It's
interesting, too, how the rhetoric of the Afghan "liberators"
and their Western supporters so closely resembles that of
the Soviets at the time of the Russian invasion. The Russians
claimed that they were liberating women, bringing education
and Western enlightenment to Afghanistan's medieval darkness:
they, too, claimed to be agents of modernity and "internationalism."
That our ostensibly "conservative" advocates of
neocolonialism and "nation-building," such as Mark
Steyn and Max Boot, are now echoing the catchphrases of the
Evil Empire in its death-throes is just one of history's delicious
little ironies.

BITTERSWEET
IRONY

Here's
another: the Northern Alliance is made up almost entirely
of those elements in Afghan society who collaborated, to some
extent, with the Soviet occupation army against the Muslim
"freedom-fighters" known as the Mujahedeen. Abdul
Rashid Dostum, whose Uzbek troops now control Kabul, supported
the pro-Soviet puppet government until it became apparent
which side was winning. The successor to Ahmed Shah Masoud,
the recently assassinated Northern Alliance military chieftain,
is Gen. Mohammed Fahim, who served in the Communist army as
one of President Najibullah's top commanders. As the recipient
of Russian (and Indian) aid, Gen. Fahim and his "Islamic
Army" are widely detested, and unlikely to provide a
stable basis for a political solution to the Afghan conundrum.

THE
REAL QUAGMIRE

The
trap set by Bin Laden, which I wrote about in
a previous column, has not yet been sprung. The real quagmire
awaits us. Will we allow ourselves to be dragged into building
what has never existed in Afghanistan, and that is
a unified nation? Will we continue to meddle where we aren't
wanted, and further incite the sort of deadly "blowback"
we have seen so much of lately? When the history books are
written, Operation Enduring Freedom will be hailed as a great
success  provided it doesn't endure much more than a few
weeks longer.

Please Support
Antiwar.com

A contribution
of $50 or more will get you a copy of Ronald Radosh's out-of-print
classic study of Old Right conservatives, Prophets on the
Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism.
Send contributions to